Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anti-capitalist Black liberation movements based in the United States. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's notion of "the cinematic"--Not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself--Keeling describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the Black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible.

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